Year: 2016

FutureLearn Learner Stories is a collection of personal experiences from a handful of the 5,000,000 FutureLearners from across the world. We’re very happy to recently read of Rachel from Cornwall who, following being made unemployed, took our two courses from the Careers Service – How to Succeed at: Writing Applications and Interviews and found they significantly improved…

Director of Sheffield Robotics and contributor to our free online course Building a Future with Robots Professor Tony Prescott has written this illuminating article for The Conversation entitled Why watching Westworld’s robots should make us question ourselves. In it, Professor Prescott uses the new HBO series Westworld as his basis for discussing how the design of increasingly complex AI…

“We all get heavier as we get older because there’s a lot more information in our heads. So I’m not fat, I’m just really intelligent and my head couldn’t hold up any more so it started filling up the rest of me. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.” – Garfield I was always…

Being a Lead Educator on Exploring Play was my first experience of being involved in a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC). This way of working appealed to me for a number of reasons. First, I was new to the University of Sheffield and developing the MOOC provided opportunities to work across Faculties and disciplines. Play is…

I first became a MOOC Mentor on the How to Succeed at: Applications and How to Succeed at: Interviews online courses, which first ran in 2014. It was a great experience. Each course attracted thousands of learners, including University of Sheffield students and graduates. This was a fantastic outcome, as it enabled them to access…

Recently the Online Learning Team went to film a robot performing surgery at the Royal Hallamshire Hospital for our upcoming course with the Department of Automatic Control and Systems Engineering. This is production manager Dave Holloway’s account of facing his fear of going under the (robotic) knife. Blood. Guts. Surgery. Three things which, if I’m honest,…

The Importance of Utilising the Expertise from the Department When Creating Online Courses As a civic university, it is essential that our researchers reach out to the public and engage them in their research – to break out of the ‘ivory tower’ of academia they have to show the public who they really are and…

On 18 December 2015, Sheffield Hallam University hosted its inaugural Social Media in Higher Education Conference. Ahead of that event, Layla Croll and the University of Sheffield’s Online Learning Team took over the School of English blog for a very special one-off post to discuss the surprising role that social media played in the delivery of our Literature…

In late October 2015, the University of Sheffield’s Online Learning Team was delighted to host a delegation of South Korean MOOC enthusiasts as part of the British Council Korea’s GREAT Britain competition, a public engagement programme designed to showcase UK higher education in Korea. The delegation were selected as part of a national competition where entrants…